https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/14/trumps-resurgence-draws-parallels-to-reagans-1980-upset-victory/
It’s hard to recapture the contempt with which Reagan was excoriated by the best and the brightest, but it was just as visceral and widespread as the animus against Trump in 2016 and today.
The 2024 presidential election is still more than 10 months away, but already there is a lot of déjà vu all over again about the festivity.
The smart money—which does not, I hasten to add, mean that it will turn out to be the most accurate money—has been telling us for months that wily Democrats have engineered Trump’s nomination because, clever chaps that they are, they know he cannot possibly win the election.
The main reason adduced is that Trump is not sufficiently popular to win. How do said pundits know this? Some point to the polls, though the polls have not been cooperating on that front of late. Trump is ahead in all or nearly all the swing states, and more and more polls put him ahead of Biden in the general election. Some adduce Trump’s “character,” his behavior after the 2020 election, and the cornucopia of indictments he faces in four separate jurisdictions. Back in December, Byron York summed up the state of play with this headline: “As Trump lead widens, prosecutors step up pursuit.”
What do you suppose most people think of that? What, I mean, do they think of a situation in which one political candidate is targeted by the opposing political party—which party, it may almost go without saying, totally controls the coercive instruments of state power? I believe most people don’t like it. They don’t like it because it reeks of basic unfairness and totalitarian overreach.
But that’s where we are now. Who knows, perhaps Jack Smith, Fani Willis, or Letitia James will finally nab Trump on one charge or another. After all, the net designed to capture the former president has been spread far and wide. But I would not be so sure. Everywhere one looks, the cases against him have come more and more to resemble the House of Usher. Fani Willis put her boyfriend on the payroll and ordered him to get Trump. Unfortunately, that secret intimacy is making headlines everywhere. The news threatens to collapse the case against Trump in Georgia.
Prosecutors in New York and Washington can rely on biased judges and juries. But I suspect that even if Trump is convicted of something in one or both places, he will win on appeal. The cases against him long ago took on the slightly comical aspect of a vendetta.